political correctness

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.” A liberal Democrat was once someone seen as a free thinker. But “progressive” implies that one is more action-orientated and has an evolutionary agenda, not just a methodology. Beware of euphemisms. Radical changes in vocabulary are usually admissions that reality is unwelcome or indefensible.

By defining racism so broadly — liberals routinely extend the charge to philosophical matters such as opposition to affirmative action and amnesty — liberalism created a culture that lent itself to over-accusation and political death penalties. Its tendency to put the worst possible interpretation on all things racial also puts Democrats in a corner. They can’t explain away these incidents as bad taste or bad humor; liberalism always looks for deeper and darker reasons than those. That’s why their apologies have to be so freighted with admissions of enormous guilt.

Recently, other ancient prejudices have been insidiously returning. And this time, the bias is more subtle, and it can be harder to address than traditional racism against non-white populations. The new venom, for example, is often spread by left-wing groups that claim victim status themselves and thus, by their logic, should not be seen as victimizers. what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

It's hard to fathom in this supercharged atmosphere, but politics actually has been more tumultuous than it is today (see: War, Civil). On the other hand, the war to define — or, better put, redefine — American culture has never been more ferocious. Its militancy has reached the point where many on the libertine-left media are aggressively, and quite publicly, demanding that parents abide by their worldview or be ostracized from polite company.

We may have iPhones instead of rope, but human nature has not changed. The competition to appear tough, cruel, defiant—and morally superior—is fed by crowds of anonymous laptop and smartphone shock troops. But what has altered is that we now have no sheriff. Or rather, our town marshal—Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.—are on the mob’s side, as if the bulwark between civilization and savagery has left the porch, joined the mob, and handed them the keys to the jail. Our tech giants selectively censor views. They ban “extremism” only when defined as loud counterrevolutionary conservatism.

Our friend Elaine Donnelly, founder and president of the Center for Military Readiness, gave us the heads-up that Marine Corps Commandant General Robert B. Neller quietly announced on a Friday afternoon that for the first time in history, a platoon of fifty enlisted female recruits would be housed and trained alongside five male platoons.

Last week the internet was awash in articles claiming that former Secretary of the Navy and Democratic Senator James Webb was under consideration to be the next Secretary of Defense. This turned out to be fake news, which is the best fake news we’ve heard in a long time, because Webb would have made a terrible Secretary of Defense.

What did it profit the Boy Scouts to gain the PC world and lose its soul? According to press reports, the Boy Scouts organization, reeling from costly homosexual abuse lawsuits, is “considering” bankruptcy. As once-great institutions teeter under the weight of failed liberalism, you would have to be dumb as a rock to stake their “survival” on even more of it. And yet that is often the counsel given by everyone from Gates and Tillerson to Pope Francis and his hapless bishops. If history has taught us anything, it is that liberalism is not an agent of expansion but an acid that burns through everything it touches.

One of the great moments of clarity Admiral Ace Lyons shared with me, and anyone else who would listen, was this: “You must understand,” said Lyons, “Islam is a totalitarian ideology bent on world domination masquerading as a religion.”

Is there a rise in anti-Semitism and, if so, where is it coming from? I won't disguise my view. Pittsburgh aside, today's anti-Semitism is largely, with minor sporadic exceptions, the product of an unholy alliance between the left and Islam. "Liberal" Jews can't face the reality of all this or don't want to, so they ignore it and don't think about it, continuing to spout bromides that were tired in the 1930s. Those bromides bear a distinct resemblance to those that were current in Berlin in those same 1930s.

Megyn Kelly will probably go into opulent seclusion and find herself disinvited from ceremonial appearances and speaking events, guillotined as a racist, with no more sympathy than a once privileged, beheaded Bourbon. We now fear the lethal wrath of the Internet’s Committee of Public Safety. But beware of fickle revolutionary temperament. Soon our 21st-century Robespierres may become so promiscuous and obnoxious in their beheading that they wear out even the mob — and find themselves next in line on a counterrevolutionary chopping block.

Tilting at snowflake machines, the once proud and serious university has decided to cash out its winnings from history in a hopeless effort to pay off the self-appointed history Gestapo now clanging at the gates with torches and pitchforks. Just ahead of the fiery mob, university officials will take down portraits, lock museum doors and rename buildings on campus in order to protect their precious young adolescents from being exposed to some of the harsher realities of American history — as well as the founding of the university itself. A slippery slope, indeed. What will you surrender the next time they come in a hot fever?

Once upon a time, Normal people were Hollywood’s heroes, rebelling against the pompous windbags who wanted to keep them down. But that’s changed. Today’s elitists are those pompous windbags, and they are terrified by the rebellion of the people they desperately want to keep quiet and submissive. Hollywood doesn’t want to stir us up with entertainment that breaks the narrative. That’s why it serves us wimpy mush, cinematic Xoloft to lull us into dead-eyed passivity.

While our institutes of higher learning preach, “question authority”, they don’t actually teach questioning anything but Western Culture and its values. No longer do students debate tough issues; no one wants to take the side of the non-politically correct.

Cultural balance is in the nature of a moral edict seemingly unloaded on society from on high. Art and plain old entertainment have come to matter less in many eyes than the redressing of grievances that numerous folk didn’t know were grievances. Ah — but then there was the “Oscars So White” phenomenon a couple of Academy Awards seasons back. If too few actors and actresses of color were up for awards, this plainly (to some) spoke of cultural bias requiring formal redress. Now it’s male bias as obstruction to equality. Self-policing and self-correction via app could be the solution.

It's about time that our default response change from “I'm sorry I gave offense” to “You're an idiot for being offended and get out of my face before I slug you.” We need more Kanyes and fewer Shanias, more people willing to stand up to the slobbering pack of Twitter social justice geebos who have achieved nothing in life except to humiliate a few weak-hearted pushovers. These are bad people, and you empower them when you treat them like anything other than the garbage people they are.

Confronted with reports of safe spaces and disinvitations, many an exasperated parent has wondered, “What’s going to happen to these kids when they have to work in the real world?” Increasingly, it seems as though the real world is conforming to the standards of the campus. If MTV were to brand the drama poised to grip American workplaces with a familiar tagline, it may sound something like, “Find out what happens when people stop being respectful and start getting woke.”

Harvey Weinstein assumed that fighting the NRA and Trump would compensate for assaulting and harassing women. Steven Colbert thought that he could use gross homophobic slurs and avoid criticism because he was doing so to attack a despised Trump who holds the nation’s nuclear codes. Christina Garcia believes that as a Latina representative of her “community,” she is exempt from the very charges she often levels against others, and she assumes that using profanity, drinking in her office, and slurring gays are the exemptions given to one who is an “advocate.” Political correctness is now the new last refuge of a scoundrel.

President Trump has signed a new memorandum that bans most individuals suffering from gender dysphoria from US military service. The new directive adopts recommendations from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that "transgender persons who require or have undergone gender transition" cannot serve.

The internet was once hailed as the ultimate channel for free expression and democratizing the world, but the worldwide web’s promise of unlimited free expression is being quickly eroded by the alliance between political tyrants anxious to retain their power and digital tyrants anxious to retain their power – and make money.